How to Believe in Ai and Edu Without Really Trying and other anecdotal remarks

How to Believe in AI and Education Without Really Trying…and other accidental wisdom from a guy who wandered into an ed-tech revolution

If you had told me back in 2020—when I was sitting in my house inventing a startup called WorldlyXP during the great global bread-baking era—that a few years later I’d be speaking at a symposium for tomorrow’s teachers at St. Vincent College, I would have laughed, coughed, and probably dropped my sourdough starter. WorldlyXP was born from equal parts desperation, curiosity, and a strong suspicion that higher education was wobbling on legs made from leftover curriculum from 1987. I had no grand plan—just a belief that maybe we could design learning that felt more like life and less like a 17-chapter PDF. And somehow, that messy experiment was the beginning of everything.

Fast forward to now, and I’m preparing a talk with the very cheerful title “How to Believe in AI and Education Without Really Trying.” The funny thing is…I didn’t really try. AI arrived like a well-meaning but slightly chaotic roommate who rearranges your furniture but also does the laundry. At some point I stopped bracing for the disruption and realized it was actually smoothing out the friction I used to just accept as “part of the job.” I became optimistic—possibly unreasonably so—that higher education could reinvent itself if we leaned into AI not just as a tool, but as a partner. Not a replacement for teachers, but a lever that amplifies everything we love about teaching: curiosity, connection, clarity, and the relief of not having to rewrite that assignment description for the eighty-third time.

Now I’m deep into building new models for postsecondary learning—systems that track skills more honestly, help students understand what they can actually do, and invite accreditors to the table not as gatekeepers but as co-designers. And here’s the twist: the accreditors are starting to say yes. Not because they suddenly woke up radical, but because they know the future is arriving whether we’re ready or not. They see what I see—students want something different, employers want something clearer, and AI is finally giving us the tools to make education responsive, humane, and shockingly efficient in ways that don’t compromise academic soul.

So on November 22nd, when I stand at the Fred Rogers Center (a place that practically radiates kindness), I’ll be talking about all the weird and wonderful turns that got me here. The failed experiments, the small victories, the startups born from chaos, the optimism born from necessity, and the deep belief that teachers are the ones who will shape the intelligent future—not the algorithms. If you’re anywhere near Latrobe that day, come join me. We’re building the next chapter of education, and it’s going to be part innovation, part storytelling, part comedy routine… and entirely worth being in the room for.